1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of computers, and specifically the software that runs on computers. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to the field of sharing content via a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ubiquitous availability of high speed networks has enabled effective collaboration. Globally distributed teams are able to operate without the need to be co-located. Meetings are routinely conducted in virtual space using web conferences and telephones. One of the cornerstones of such collaborative work is instant messaging (or chat). Federated chat clients that can connect to more than one such infrastructure are also becoming popular.
Virtual meetings are typically conducted using presentations, or show and tell type demonstrations. A presentation allows a presenter to present a document, such as a word processing document, a slide show, a spreadsheet, etc. A show and tell type demonstration allows a presenter to dynamically demonstrate how a particular application functions. In either case, participants join a telephone conference with the presenter. Participants have access to the material of a conference in one of two ways—either via a local copy of the material (common in presentations) or via a web conference (common in show and tell type demonstrations).
In the case of a presentation where all parties are viewing the material locally, the presenter needs to ensure that all participants are viewing the same part of the material. The presenter is forced to constantly call out the part of the material they are currently viewing, making it a very distracting and ineffective process. Even so, the presenter is not guaranteed that all participants continue to be in synch. If a participant temporarily focuses on a different task, they quickly go out of synch and need to interrupt the presenter.
In the case of a show and tell type demonstration, the material (e.g., an application) is accessible only to the presenter. Participants are able to view the material via a web conference wherein the presenters' interactions with the material are broadcast to the participants using a stream of non-interactive graphics. With this approach, participants do not have access to the actual material and are restricted to viewing only those interactions that the presenter chooses. Even in cases where they have access to the material locally (for example, demo of an installed product) they are unable to see the interactions in their local context. This leads to an ineffective learning process for the participants. Further, the broadcast of high resolution graphics to a large audience is ineffective and results in wasted bandwidth. Also, this approach requires infrastructure to enable web conferencing.